Android News

According to a report at BriefMobile, the extremely powerful Motorola Atrix 4G will soon become even better. It seems that leaked versions of an upcoming Gingerbread update for the phone make it possible to unlock the bootloader. This comes in the wake of Motorola promising to release more phones with unlocked bootloaders in the third and fourth quarters of this year.

If you are not part of the custom ROM phenomenon in the Android community, then you may be wondering why this is important. An unlocked bootloader allows users to do is create and install custom kernels and start up code, which is necessary to load custom software onto their phones. This means that projects like CyanogenMod would be able to come to Motorola’s flagship dual-core phones.

It appears that these decisions are the result of a large amount of community applied pressure on the handset manufacturer, who has become famous for their policy regarding bootloaders.

Motorola received a large amount of bad press when they originally released the Atrix with its bootloader locked. The power and unique features of the phone made it a huge draw for Android power users. However, these same consumers were turned off by the idea of not having the ability to load custom versions of Android onto their phones.

BriefMobile reports that the Chinese and AT&T versions of the Atrix will be receiving the over-the-air update that includes the ability to unlock the bootloader sometime in July. Update times for other variants, including Bell, are still unknown, but many users and analysts are hopeful that the update will become available for them as well.